1
Transgress, to pass beyond the limit of or set by: to overstep, exceed:
to infringe - to offend by violating a law.
2"Salo
goes so far beyond the limits that those who habitually speak badly of
me will have to find new terms".
The
transgressive text is one that aims at questioning, critiquing or subverting
that which is considered normative. The transgressive text seeks a mode
of ennunciation which has the potential to disrupt or subvert the status
quo. This mode of ennunciation may also seek to shock or scandalise and
in these endeavours is explicitly self conscious. The transgressive text,
invariably, carries within itself the awareness of its own intentions.
Such self consciousness suggests not only an awareness of its own intentions
or possibilities but also an acute perceptibility of its limitations.
A text which
aims at transgressing must look for ways to go beyond mere notions of 'shock'.
Shock's affectivity is predicated on a 'one-off' basis which is to say
that its potential to disrupt is dissipated by repetition. The transgressive
text must, instead, look for a form of disruption which goes beyond the
mere transitory as anything less will, inevitably, result in reabsorption,
reification or commodification. There seems little doubt that Salo Or
The 120 Days Of Sodom (1975) was Pasolini's attempt to fashion just
such a text and this essay seeks to analyse to what degree transgression
is 'successful'. Was Pasolini, who loathed consumerism with a vengance,
able to fashion a text so subversive and extreme that it was able to resist
consumption by proving, finally, 'indigestible'?
Salo is Pasolini's
uncompromising indictment of the modern world and a society informed by
a purely instrumental and functional reason. This is a world which has
no place for Pasolini's romanticised and idealised notions of the archaic,
the primitive or the irrational. Such notions were, for Pasolini, 'sacred'
representations of a mythical pre-historic or pre-symbolic which stood
in direct opposistion to the bourgeois world of history and language. It
was Pasolini's abnegation of Enlightenment or bourgeois rationality that,
perhaps, attracted him to the writings of the Marquis de Sade.
It was De Sade's
perceived 'extremism', his trenchant critiques of that rationality,
which had led to
his systematic vilification, demonisation and eventual incarceration
by the emergent
bourgeoisie. Les 120 Journees de Sodome was, in fact, written
while De Sade was
imprisoned in the Bastille and fittingly, given its coprophagic
activities, finished
on a roll of toilet paper. De Sade was fully aware of the scandalous
quality inherent
in the finished text proclaiming that it was the work of a 'dissolute
imagination, such
has never been seen'.3
De Sade set his novel
during the Thirty Years' War and it is built around the detailing of perversions
committed by four nouveau riche libertines on sixteen young peasants.
These 'extravagances of debauchery' take place within the hermetic confines
of the Chateau of Silling while in Pasolini's 're-reading' of De Sade the
activities are transposed to a Northern Italian villa circa 1944. The actual
town of Salo was, of course, the site of Mussolini's short lived puppet
republic.
While Salo
remains cognisant of De Sade's concerns it is significant that Pasolini
chose to 'up-date' the events of novel by locating them in the modern Fascist
period. Pasolini believed that Fascism was the logical culmination of the
effects of bourgeois economy and culture and,somewhat more contentiously,
that it corresponded to the 'unreality' of modern capitalist or consumer
society. Discussions of Fascism are, in any given context, highly charged
affairs and Pasolini's take drew a certain amount of invective. Roland
Barthes, in particular, took exception to what he regarded as a distorted
conflation of 'Fascism System' and 'Fascism Substance'.4
The former is posited as historically specific while the latter, being
more nebulous, is able 'to circulate at anytime'. In other words, Salo's
representation of Fascism is caught in a perilous divide between 'reality'
and metaphor. This view overlooks the possibility that Pasolini was not
at all interested in fashioning a historically coherent world that could
exist outside his own writing. As Sam Rohdie states: 'there is no location
in Pasolini's work from which he tried to dominate time and events and
turn them into a past, either the illusory past of a fiction or the illusory
past of history'.5
In a sense, then,
Salo's
representation of Fascism exists outside of history and is caught up in
the hermetic space of an Nietzschean 'eternal now'; the present moment,emerging
in its brute primacy, is all that matters as notions of past and future
are gradually bracketted off. Consequently, there is no pretense in Salo's
exploration of the socio-ecomomic factors which may contribute to the rise
of Fascism. What has tended to happen in certain other films, which have
taken examinations of Fascism as points of departure, is that the eschewal
of such considerations has resulted in the subject being collapsed, for
example, into some form of 'sexual pathology'. I am thinking,here, of the
Night of the Long Knives sequence from Visconti's
The Damned (1969)
in which the transvestism and (implied) homosexual activities of the SA
officers represent, for the Nazis, a form of 'decadence' which must be
expunged for the well being of the Party. At the same time, however, Visconti
appears to be suggesting that this 'decadence' is an overt manifestation
of a 'sickness' which is embedded in Fascist ideology. Liliana Cavani's
The Night Porter (1973), on the other hand, seems to play upon the
misguided and dangerous notion that Fascism is, somehow, 'inherently sexy'.
That film's depiction of sado-erotic 'mind games' between a former SS officer
and a concentration camp survivor along with the attendant fetishisation
of Nazi iconography result in the text leaving itself wide open to charges
of crass sensationalism.
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1 Chambers 20th Century
Dictionary, A M Macdonald, ed. W & R Chambers, (London 1972) p.
1431.
2 Pier Paolo Pasolini, quoted in Pier
Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy, by Naomi Greene, (Princeton UP 1990)
p. 134.
3 Hood, Stuart and Graham Cowley, Introducing
De Sade, Icon Books, (London 1999) p. 78.
4 Greene, p.
203.
5 Rohdie, Sam, The Passion of Pier
Paolo Pasolini, BFI Publishing, (London 1995) p. 63.
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